"Mademoiselle N----" said Baufré, noticing the direction of my glance.
"She is the richest woman in all the Marquesas."

At the Gospel she came in, walking slowly down the aisle and taking
her place as though unaware of the hundred covert glances that
followed her. Wealth is comparative, and Mademoiselle N----, with
perhaps a few hundred thousand dollars in cash and cocoanut-grove,
stood to the island people as Rockefeller to us. Money and lands
were not all her possessions, for though she had never traveled from
her birthplace, she was very different in carriage and costume from
the girls about her.

She wore a black lace gown, clinging, and becoming her slender
figure and delicately charming face. Her features were exquisite,
her eyes lustrous black pools of passion, her mouth a scarlet line
of pride and disdain. A large leghorn hat of fine black straw, with
chiffon, was on her graceful head, and her tiny feet were in silk
stockings and patent leather. She held a gold and ivory prayer-book
in gloved hands, and a jeweled watch hung upon her breast.

She might have passed for a Creole or for one of those beautiful
Filipino _mestizas_, daughters of Spanish fathers and Filipino
mothers. I suppose coquetry in woman was born with the fig-leaf.
This dainty, fetching heiress, born of a French father and a savage
mother, had all the airs and graces of a ballroom belle. Where had
she gained these fashions and desires of the women of cities, of
Europe?

I had but to look over the church to feel her loneliness. Teata,
Many Daughters, Weaver of Mats, and Flower, savagely handsome,